Concert Review,
swans,
the tralf,
tom
—
As The Tralf slowly filled up Friday night for Swans' final show of an extensive North American tour, the swelling suspension of hushed bar-bellying chitchat would eventually prove to be the augmented antipode to the sonic gut-check we were all about to endure. It’s as if we were all about to lose our virginity over and over again. My ears had mused of this event hundreds of times before. Noticing the dark bouquet of instruments and amplifiers all seamlessly arranged and woven into the notoriously superb sound system that is Tralf Music Hall built plenty of anticipation for the show, but knowing that these apparatus were poised by the hands of Michael Gira and company to emit frequencies that would make my ears sore for days was another prodigious unreality altogether. Swans have been known to play anywhere from two to three hour sets, but their sound checks are often much longer.
As I made my lone beer purchase of the night, the heart-stopping screech-pulse of Pharmakon promptly switched on, and suddenly the place evaporated. Hovering over various effects pedals and under a red, Lynchian glow, 22-year-old Margaret Chardiet blew our minds, in what was her fifth and last show opening for Swans. As she clutched the microphone with both hands, Chardiet’s white blond hair formed an agitated veil against her face. Hunched over and spewing abrasive vocals into the mic, she hopped off stage and sifted through the audience as she sang “Ache,” a menacingly numb track off her debut LP Abandon, released by Sacred Bones earlier this year. Pharmakon played the entire four-track album and bolted behind the curtain as if she was never there. I wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead as the club continued to inflate.
Gira came out with his accompanying quintet of close-knit musicians and politely and directly asked anyone seated to get up and come as close to the stage as possible, especially if we “wanted to hear it.” Hear it? Hearing Swans was never an issue at any point during the night, on the contrary, ear plugs were probably in order, as the reconstituted noise-rock giants put on the most intense sonic performance I have ever witnessed. From Gira’s phantasmic dance orchestration, to his animated portrayals and vocal crumblings, the band embarked on a performance that was both brutal and perennial in all of its molasses-textured scope.
While many of the songs played were new and are set to be recorded for a forthcoming 2014 release, Swans have essentially been taking the best music they’ve made of their careers in last year’s LP, The Seer, and only slightly reinventing it every night. Gira’s vision is specific, he's not about improvisation. Instead, he is constantly shaping every malleable part as a blacksmith, bludgeoning every component toward the inevitably sharp whole, and as a result, the live experience is far less simulated, and somehow more mobilized than the studio record. It’s a sweltering game of Marco Polo. It’s studious and cryptic. It’s meticulously sexual.
Between repetitious walls of guitar and cymbal clash, mystical clarinet and horns, teeth-gritting bass lines, and climaxes of charisma from Gira, Swans were primed from start to finish. From the very opening hymn and new song “To Be Kind,” which prematurely blew out an amp or two (such is virginity), to the final blunder of instrumental floodgates within the 32-minute epic “The Seer” and finale “Toussaint Louverture song,” the show was increasingly topographical and as endurance-based as scaling a mountain. There was never a moment where you didn’t understand the trajectory of the set, and there was never a moment when time was completely measurable either (it clocked in at around two hours). It was like the Tralf sunk into a temporary wrinkle in the skin of the universe; our fate wasn’t completely certain until Gira and his men took one another’s hands and bowed to an eruption of applause, as he closed the show with one last offer to hear him: “If any of you want to talk or hang out afterward, I’ll be at the table in the back...”
Without a doubt one of the BEST concerts I've ever seen